FX Trading Platform – A Top Japanese Investment Bank

Altibase enhanced the company’s capabilities with the ability to transact at speeds of 1 million per second, increasing profitability and competitiveness.

Use Case: FX Margin Trading System

Current Customers: Top Japanese securities and investment banks

Industry: Finance

Who

The company is Japan’s foremost securities and investment bank with substantial global reach and international presence. It provides individual and institutional clients with a broad range of services, including trading, investment advisory services and securities underwriting.

Problem

The company was facing several issues as it globally expanded its FX trading platform. International scale presented crucial obstacles resulting from greater demands on its existing trading systems. The company’s data processing lacked the three fundamental requirements of speed, reliability and functionality.

The company’s FX platform could not process and react to an influx of new information such as mission critical employment data from USA.

To make matters worse, the continuous feed of worldwide transactions and events rendered the company’s existing system meritless. When currency fluctuations were especially volatile, this only further paralyzed the process.

The company was struggling to provide compulsory “ALWAYS ON” performance features, but it could not do it with its existing on-disk DBMS.

The company could not support advancements in technology. Smartphone applications and tablets and other multi-device support went unmet.

Solution

The company adopted the IIJ Raptor Service[1] that embedded Altibase with hybrid architecture. The company’s FX trading platform now runs seamlessly 24/7.

Results

The company has substantially grown its client base by leveraging its ability to process more than 1,000 FX TPS.

The company has attracted an unprecedented cavalcade of younger, multi-device users with its fail-safe iOS and Android integration.

The company processes granular informational data (i.e. USA employment statistics) 100 times faster than before at a rate of 1,000,000 per second.

The company can mark-to-market 60 times faster than before. What used to take 60 seconds now takes only 1 second.

The company’s related operating cost has decreased by 10%.

The company provides multi-currency exchange services such as Euro/Dollar, enabling it to further expand its international scale.

Technical Details – FX Trading Platform

The company achieved outstanding results by leveraging the key features of Altibase, specifically in the areas of high performance of its hybrid architecture and HA.

High Performance

With its conventional back-end on-disk DBMS, the company’s FX trading platform could not adapt to growing demands which included dynamic information processing such as mission critical, streaming employment data from USA.

The ever increasing trading volumes resulted in significant surges in database transactions. This increase placed intense strain on the abilities of the existing legacy on-disk DBMS. Severe bottleneck was the result.

The company replaced the existing on-disk DBMS with Altibase in hybrid mode. Because the company was able to divide the entire data into hot and cold data utilizing Altibase’s hybrid architecture, it achieved optimal performance.

Further improving performance, the company employed a standard Altibase protocol, Inter-Process Communication (IPC) protocol, which possesses the fastest communication protocols. IPC makes use of shared memory to allow simultaneous data exchanges among running processes. IPC protocol can be used when both the client application and Altibase server are installed on a single machine. This architecture allowed the company best-in-class processing and response time. The company processes granular informational data (i.e. USA employment statistics) 100 times faster at a rate of 1,000,000 per second.

HA

In addition to performance issues attributable to increased transaction volumes, the company’s conventional on-disk database had reliability and stability problems.

Altibase’s built-in replication feature solved these issues without requiring the company to invest in additional hardware or software resources.

Using the replication feature, the company implemented Altibase based on an active-standby HA architecture using synchronous replication mode. The synchronous mode keeps all replication targets synchronized by updating all nodes as part of a single atomic transaction. Synchronous mode guarantees 100% data integrity.

This architecture ensured that the company’s mission critical data was never compromised by unplanned downtime due to a system crash, malfunctions or even planned downtime due to patches or upgrades to Altibase.

[1] IIJ Raptor Service is a cloud based FX service provided by IIJ, one of the top system integrators in Japan.